


christmas letter

by melodiousb



Category: Mrs. Pollifax - Dorothy Gilman
Genre: Christmas, Gen, Surveillance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 09:21:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17057087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melodiousb/pseuds/melodiousb
Summary: She’s always tried to model herself on people like her efficient neighbor Miss Hartshorne, or her aunt who sat on the boards of six different charities, but these days, when she finds herself in an unfamiliar situation, she’s more likely to wonder what John Sebastian Farrell would do.





	christmas letter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrikate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrikate/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I loved your prompt and felt lucky to claim it.

_Dear Mr. Carstairs_ , Mrs. Pollifax writes, and puts down her pen. She’s not quite sure how to begin, but someone ought to know about this, and Mr. Carstairs is the only appropriate someone she knows.

She’s not in the habit of writing business letters. Postcards, certainly. Letters to her children and grandchildren. Long, gossipy letters devoid of any real substance to old school friends and couples she used to know when her husband was alive and her children were small. Friendly letters. But...Carstairs is a sort of a friend, isn’t he? Her feelings towards him are friendly, and she thinks his feelings towards her are, too. 

_I hope you are well_ , she continues. _And Bishop, too. You both looked very run down last time I saw you, although very distinguished, still, of course. Merry Christmas to you both. I am well. The weather here has been very warm for the time of year, but a little dry for my indoor plants._

She reads that over, and then crosses out the last line. This is a letter to a friend, to be sure, but it is not merely a friendly letter.

_I am writing to tell you of a curious incident--of a series of curious incidents that have occurred here over the past week. I sincerely hope that I have a wrong impression, and that the two men are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, or at least that their wrongdoing is only personal._

That looks less clear than it might.

_I mean to say that I hope their wrongdoing is not the kind that requires your attention, or that of anyone in your organization, although of course wrongdoing that requires the attention of the police is also regrettable and if this is that I trust that you will know who to pass the information on to. And of course it could be nothing at all but when I saw the license plate I had to consider the possibility…_

*

Bishop knocks on Carstairs’ door. His boss has set aside their first quiet morning in months to review the stack of reports that’s been accumulating at the corner of his desk. Once every couple of days Bishop notices it listing to one side and nudges it in another direction.

They’ve just wrapped up a couple of cases--one that’s been steadily wearing them down for months, and one that had them working around the clock for a week, running on coffee and adrenaline and little else--and Bishop had hoped for a day off to catch up on sleep, but if Carstairs is here bright and early, he has to be, too.

Carstairs looks up and sighs. He’s a little gray in the face, and Bishop wonders, not for the first time, whether it would be strictly ethical to ask the scientists downstairs for something that will knock Carstairs out for a few hours.

“Can it wait?” Carstairs asks wearily.

“It can,” says Bishop, and Carstairs’ eyes sharpen just like Bishop meant them to. “But...I thought you could use a pick-me-up. And I have a letter here from Mrs. Emily Pollifax, of New Brunswick, New Jersey.”

*

She’d seen them for the first time on a Friday night, after she ran out of cream cheese and had to drive forty-five minutes to buy more at the supermarket that stayed open late. The Save-Our-Environment Committee would disapprove, if they knew, and she really did mean to buy a bicycle soon, so that she could get around without polluting, but that wouldn’t do for long distances anyway, and the committee would enjoy the sandwiches.

She was second guessing her choice of additional sandwich fillings as she headed back to her car, and wouldn’t have noticed the two men at all if they hadn’t abruptly stopped talking when they saw her. 

Well, if they didn’t want her to see them, she would pretend that she hadn’t. She walked on, at the same pace, and didn’t turn her head. She didn’t need to, to see one of them pass a long envelope to the other. It was a bad habit, noticing things people would rather keep private, and one she’d only developed since she started occasionally working as a courier for the CIA. She’s always tried to model herself on people like her efficient neighbor Miss Hartshorne, or her aunt who sat on the boards of six different charities, but these days, when she finds herself in an unfamiliar situation, she’s more likely to wonder what John Sebastian Farrell would do.

She stops by her car and fumbles with her keys before deliberately dropping them on the ground. She listens carefully for a moment before picking up the keys and standing again. When she glances over, neither of the men is standing by the car she assumed belonged to one of them. One is halfway down the street, and the other is in the parking lot of the next store over, unlocking a dark sedan. “Odd,” Mrs. Pollifax says to herself. “But really none of my business.”

She sees the second man again several days later, walking down the street in town. Not the stocky one with greying blond hair, but the small, squirrely one with the pencil mustache. She meets his eyes briefly, but there’s no sign of recognition from him and none, she hopes, from her. Without bothering to justify to herself what is, frankly, a ridiculous thing to do, she loops around the block and watches to see where he goes. 

The bank is an innocent destination, surely. She ought to go there herself, as a matter of fact. She has some jewelry in her safe deposit box there, and she’s been thinking about giving Jane her grandmother’s amber beads for Christmas. She could go right now, actually, but somehow she’s reluctant to give the man another look at her.

She waits for several minutes before she acknowledges that that’s what she’s doing--waiting for him to come out. She crosses the street and goes into the bookstore across from the bank. It’s much larger, brighter, and more American than a certain bookstore in Mexico City, but she thinks of it anyway. She’s changed since then. She wouldn’t have followed a stranger then just because she’d seen him once under vaguely suspicious circumstances. She wouldn’t have immediately singled out the bookstore as the best place to surveil the bank. But she’d like to think that was merely a lack of confidence, and an imagination that hadn’t been turned in the right direction yet. After all, even if nothing comes of this venture--and nothing _should_ \--it’s not bad practice.

She looks at a display of books near the window, frowning at them as if deciding on a purchase, until the man emerges from the bank. He’s empty-handed, and Mrs. Pollifax feels obscurely disappointed, even though she hadn’t known she expected him to have anything. Then he turns, and she sees it: another long envelope, like the one he’d handed off to the other man outside of the supermarket, tucked into his jacket.

Even then, she doesn’t think it’s important. She’s just walking behind him--across the street and a dozen yards back--because she’s curious. Then she sees his car--a sleek, dark limousine, not the car she’d seen him with the other night. The license plate looks unfamiliar, and she waits for him to drive past her to get a better look at it. Diplomatic plates.

“Oh,” she says, and walks back to her own car, thinking hard.

She really has very little to go on. Just a man, and two envelopes, and two encounters. Probably his envelopes are nothing important. But she’s practicing, and if she’d seen this happen in another country, one she’d been sent to by Mr. Carstairs...she’s seen the man get rid of one envelope and acquire another. Who is to say he won’t get rid of this one in the same way?

Mrs. Pollifax will be leaving to visit Jane in Arizona for Christmas in a few days. Perhaps she should bake some cookies to take with her. She remembers seeing a big selection of Christmas cookie cutters in the supermarket the other night. She’ll go tonight, and if she happens to see anything interesting in the parking lot…

She gets there a little earlier than last time. The cookie cutter display is impressive, and she picks out a Christmas tree, a candy cane, and a sleigh. Then she goes back to her car, parked in the darkest part of the lot, and waits. 

The two men look around when they arrive--drawing attention to themselves, Mrs. Pollifax thinks, disapprovingly--but she’s sitting low in her seat, a dark scarf over her white hair, and her car appears to be empty. They talk briefly, and the man she saw earlier in the day hands over the envelope. Then they leave.

“Well,” Mrs. Pollifax says to herself. “I suppose I’ve learned something, but I’m not sure what.”

*

A buzzer sounds on Bishop’s desk. “Yes?”

“Get me Straker upstairs,” says Carstairs. “He wanted to know about an information leak in a certain embassy and I think we might have it.”

“Mrs. Pollifax?” asks Bishop.

“Can we send her a fruitcake or something?” says Carstairs.

“I’ll see what I can do, sir.”

When Bishop goes into the office to add another report to the pile a little while later, Carstairs looks a little more alive. 

“She always gets you what you need, doesn’t she?” he says. “Our Mrs. Pollifax.”

“It’s a good lead,” says Carstairs. “But we don’t know if anything will come of it.”

Bishop agrees, but that’s not what he meant. Carstairs looks, now, like a smile wouldn’t shatter his face. He goes back to his desk and makes arrangements for the fruitcake--and for a quick trip to an expensive milliner this afternoon. He doesn’t want their gift to look too shabby next to hers.


End file.
